Wasabi Tuna

Wasabi Tuna Review

By Don Willmott

Wasabi Tuna is the kind of farce that won't settle for just one Anna Nicole Smith drag queen impersonator. It delivers four of them (including the inevitable Alexis Arquette), and naturally one of them is a midget. The fake Annas are there because the real Anna also makes a brief appearance, attempting to play herself and not totally succeeding, making it abundantly clear that this steaming pile was rushed to the screen back in 2003 to make the most of her 14 minutes of fame.

Must I go on? OK. If Anna's not your thing, maybe you'll get off on watching rapidly aging but still hunky Antonio Sabato Jr. as a hardcore lycra-clad spinning instructor leading a class of horny ladies who want to lick the sweat off his tattooed pecs. He's the buddy of Harvey and Evan (Barney Cheng and Jason London), a gay couple who become unwitting drug couriers while doing interior decorating work for an evil and ultra-rich Armenian shrew/drug trafficker who keeps two leather chaps-wearing boy toys as her personal servants.

All Harvey and Evan want to do is pull together a bunch of gangsta Halloween costumes and borrow a low rider for their friends to use in the West Hollywood Halloween parade, but soon a wild chase begins as fives cars worth of thugs, drug dealers, gay boys, drag queens, and cops race across LA. Tim Meadows is in there somewhere, too.

The action leads to Chinatown, where an old Chinese man (also played by Cheng) is in cahoots with the Armenian drug queen. The final brawl involves the drag Annas, the real Anna, a lovely trio of Kung Fu cuties, the cops, and perhaps a kitchen sink that I failed to spot in the chaos.

Like Alexis Arquette, Wasabi Tuna goes down easy, but it's really really really stupid. Cheng's off-hand line delivery makes him the breakout star of this mess, but that's not saying much. Avoid this one unless you've drunk most of a bottle of sake first.